Gamescom 2014: The Vanishing of Ethan Carter: A Wonderfuly Horrifying Adventure Game

The opening 30 minutes of The Vanishing of Ethan Carter unfolds with an expert sense of pace, storytelling, and horror mystery. The first game from The Astronauts, a Polish team comprised of many former-People Can Fly folks who worked on Bulletstorm and Gears of War: Judgment, Ethan Carter is a visually-stunning first-person adventure game. With its stripped down, but effective mechanics, impeccable atmosphere, and great writing, its opening sets the stage for what could be video games’ next great murder mystery.

Ethan Carter places you in the shoes of Paul Prospero, and private investigator with an ability to manipulate reality and see into the past. After receiving a letter from the titular boy who then promptly goes missing, Prospero travels to rural Wisconsin for what he somehow knows will be his last case. The writing here is in strong form, with bits of Prospero’s internal monologue containing the same sort of wizened nihilism found in True Detective. His thoughts about nature, innocence, and an impending doom that seems to be surrounding him are a joy to read, as well as listen to thanks to a lead voice action with an understanding of the subtleties of noir.

Set in the fictional area of Wisconsin called Red Creek Valley, the woods, hills, and lakes are undeniably gorgeous – The Astronauts employed a technique of building the world by stitching together hundreds of photographs of various elements of nature. The game is right up there with Everybody’s Gone to the Rapture as some of the most realistic visuals I’ve seen in a first-person game. But at the same time, wandering around the world left me with a lingering feeling of tantalizing unease. Things aren’t quite right here. There's a sense of pain and anguish hidden beneath the flora, sometimes quite literally when you stumble upon the remains of a human.

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I love the subtlety of the environmental storytelling at play here.

I love the subtlety of the environmental storytelling at play here. It never bashed me over the head with exposition, instead trusting me enough to explore the world and piece together bits of information as I went along. I never had a full grasp on just what was going on, but I loved remaining in that tantalizing period of limbo. I chose to wander off the beaten path, which led me to a series of dangerous traps littered throughout the woods. After examining all five of them, Prospero was able to use whatever his ability might be to open up a rift to somewhere (The Past? The Future? Michigan?), and shed a bit of light on the backstory and circumstances that led to me being there.

Eventually I stumbled upon the scene of a gruesome murder – a pair of severed legs sat near a set of train tracks, a trail of blood led down a dusty path, and eventually stopped at the body of a man with his head bashed in. When you get near objects of importance, Prospero’s thoughts will manifest in the form of a few words which linger near the artifact. It's a bit like Murdered: Soul Suspect, but less intrusive, and it does a good job at delivering insight into the character while simultaneously providing some genuinely interesting gameplay.

From here, it was up to me to explore the surroundings, find clues in the environment, and eventually piece together the events in chronological order. It was a smart, intuitive, and unobtrusive puzzle that didn’t feel shoehorned in for the sake of added gameplay, but rather a mechanic that helped flesh out the world and my own personal backstory. Think of Gone Home with some light puzzle solving, and you'll get an idea for what you'll be doing in The Vanishing of Ethan Carter.

The demo ended with a hint that Prospero’s abilities aren’t the only form of magic in this world. Mentions of some form of a dark entity brought to bind the Old Gods of Lovecraft, though I can’t say for sure how far down the gothic rabbit hole Ethan Carter will eventually go when it's released on PC later this year, and PS4 at some point in 2015.

I walked away from my time with Ethan Carter in a strange haze, and I mean that in the best possible way. The world I’d just visited was gorgeous and serene, while simultaneously drenched in melancholy, violence, and hints of some sort of supernatural menace in the air. I don’t fully know what The Vanishing of Ethan Carter is about, or where the adventure will eventually take me, but I'm more than happy to keep following it deeper and deeper.